Frozen dough has been in high demand with a shortage of employees and reduced working hours in the bread baking industry and with needs of consumers for fresh-baked bread.
The freezing and thawing processes cause freezing damage to dough and bread, such as reduced volume of bread, and deteriorated texture and taste in bread baked from previously frozen and thawed dough. In order to find countermeasures against the freezing damage, various studies, including development of freeze-resistant yeast, have been undertaken. Since there is some doubt about the safety of incorporating potassium bromate in the dough, which has been used as a dough conditioner composition, L-ascorbic acid and other compounds are currently used as conditioners, though they do not provide sufficient freezing damage resistance. The newly developed conditioners are applied only to pastries having relatively high freezing resistance, such as Danish pastries. These conditioners cannot be used for breads having a lean composition, like French bread, since such breads have short shelf life and extremely low freezing resistance.
Edible emulsifiers are known to have conditioning effects for bread dough. The emulsifiers improve the properties of dispersing and swelling of fats, oils, and other ingredients, and have appreciable interactions with lipids, starch, and proteins, thereby exerting the conditioning effects in each process of bread-making. More concretely, emulsifiers improve the machine-resistance of the dough; increase the loaf volume of bread; and prevent excessive pores caused by freezing, thus functioning to provide baked bread of fine texture and good taste. The emulsifiers also improve shelf life.
However, the emulsifiers conventionally used should be preheated, prior to dispersing or dissolving in water, to provide any effect in freeze damage-resistance. This requires time and labor and, nevertheless, the conventional emulsifiers do not have sufficient conditioning or freeze damage-resistance effects.